It was established on 24 January 1857 and is the oldest multidisciplinary university of Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asian Region.

Today, the university's jurisdiction is limited to a few districts of West Bengal, but at the time of its establishment it had a catchment area ranging from Kabul to Myanmar.

Its alumni and faculty include several heads of state and government, social reformers, prominent artists, the only Indian Dirac Medal winner, many Fellows of the Royal Society and six Nobel laureates as of 2019.

The Nobel laureates associated with this university are Ronald Ross, Rabindranath Tagore, C. V. Raman, Amartya Sen, and Abhijit Banerjee.

[11][12][13] The first chancellor and vice-chancellor of the Calcutta University were Governor General Lord Canning and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Sir William Colvile, respectively.

During that period, the Council Room of the Calcutta Medical College and private residence of the vice-chancellor used to house the Senate meetings.

Because of the lack of space, university examinations were conducted in the Kolkata Town Hall and in tents in the Maidan urban park.

In the same year, the Government of British India granted a sum of ₹8 lakh (equivalent to ₹25 crore or US$2.9 million in 2023) for the acquisition of a market, Madhab Babu's Bazar, situated adjacent to the Senate House, and construction of a new building for the teaching departments began.

Between 1912 and 1914, Taraknath Palit and Rash Behari Ghosh, two eminent lawyers, donated assets totalling ₹25 lakh (equivalent to ₹67 crore or US$7.7 million in 2023), and founded the University College of Science at Upper Circular Road (now known as Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road).

The West Bengal Secondary Education Act was passed in the same year linking the university with the school leaving examination.

In 1957, the university's centenary year, it received a grant of ₹1 crore (equivalent to ₹100 crore or US$12 million in 2023) from the University Grants Commission, which aided with the construction of the Centenary Building on the College Street campus and the Law College Building on Hazra Road campus.

Currently, it houses the Central Library, the Asutosh Museum of Indian Art, the centenary auditorium and a number of university offices.

This brought the government and territories of the East India Company, including the University of Calcutta, under the British Crown.

School of Information Technology and the Department of Applied Optics and Photonics, in Sector 3, JD Block, Salt Lake.

[37][38] At one time, the university had a huge catchment area in British India, ranging from Lahore in the west to Rangoon in east and Ceylon in the south.

Schools situated in districts like Rawalpindi, Lahore, Jaypur, Cawnpur, and Mussoorie used to prepare and send students for the university entrance examination.

In the act, the Governor-General-in-Council was given the power to the limit territorial jurisdiction of the five universities; Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, the Punjab and Allahabad.

In the same year, University of Dacca was established and some colleges in East Bengal went under it and whole control was cut with the partition of India in 1947.

[48] For engineering courses, admission is based on the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination (WBJEE) rankings.

This is the Center for Research in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (CRNN) on the Technology Campus of CU at Salt Lake, West Bengal.

The university library has over one million books and more than 200,000 bound journals, proceedings, manuscripts, patents and other valuable collections.

[72][73] It was also awarded the status of "Centre with Potential for Excellence in Particular Area" in Electro-Physiological and Neuro-imaging studies including mathematical modeling.

[82][83] The Calcutta University Students' Union organises social and cultural activities occasionally, which include blood donation camps, environmental awareness programmes, relief fund collection, teachers day celebrations, and Saraswati puja, among others.

Nobel laureates who either studied or worked there include Rabindranath Tagore, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, Ronald Ross,[89] Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee.

Some of the industrialists who studied at the university include Sir Rajen Mookerjee, Rama Prasad Goenka, Lakshmi Mittal, and Aditya Birla.

Notable scientists, medical doctors and mathematicians associated with the university include Jagadish Chandra Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray, Meghnad Saha, Anil Kumar Gain, Satyendra Nath Bose, Subir Kumar Ghosh, Ashoke Sen, Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, C. R. Rao, Asima Chatterjee, and Ujjwal Maulik.

The former rulers of the Indian princely state of Coochbehar and of Saraikela were also alumni of this university, as were colonial-era prime ministers Albion Rajkumar Banerjee of Kashmir and A.K.

[91] Heads of state from other countries associated with the university include four presidents of Bangladesh (Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Mohammad Mohammadullah, Abu Sadat Mohammad Sayem, and Abdus Sattar) two prime ministers of Bangladesh (Muhammad Mansur Ali and Shah Azizur Rahman), three prime ministers of Pakistan (Mohammad Ali Bogra, Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, and Nurul Amin), the first premier of Burma under British rule, Ba Maw, the first president of Nepal, Ram Baran Yadav, and the first democratically elected prime minister of Nepal, Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala, as well as his successor Tulsi Giri.

[91] One of the prominent indigenous leaders from the Tripuri Community, Birendra Kishore Roaza, also graduated from the University.

[94] Notably, Gyanendra Nath Chakravarti, an influential Indian Theosophist and a key figure in the early Theosophical Society,[95] is also an alumnus of Calcutta University.